SPLOTs. Who can’t get enough of them? Most of the internet, I am sure. It’s been a while, aka five years, since I cued up Cher and Whats His Name for that funky toe tapping beat.
It’s been literally years since I touched the WordPress themes that power SPLOTs. Yet weirdly, and with all the WP death throes supposedly (or is it just not being hip anymore), they still work. For a while I had a few browser tabs open with examples I had seen, but alas, somebody closed dem tags.
Fortunately today I got the nicest out of the blue email from Daniel Villar Onrubia who was amongst the most frequent and creative users of SPLOTs back in his days at Coventry University in the UK and a few more I heard of in his role with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
In his message with a subject line “Life of SPLOT”, Daniel wrote
I just wanted to share with you some news I recently got about the successful life of one of the SPLOTs we installed as part of one of our international projects. Even though the project ended a while ago, I am so glad to hear it is still actively used and fully integrated into the curriculum at Bergen Uni in Norway. They said “WE ARE DATA is getting very good feedback from students in all classes, and I must say it really is a delight to assess them. I’m thoroughly impressed by it, alongside so many of the other nice games that came out of DALI.”
In case you are curious, here is the link https://wearedata.dalicitizens.eu/
Wow!
DALI is the Data Literacy for Citizenship project and the We Are Data is a site powered by TRU Collector SPLOT theme with some 2200+ collected impressive data visualizations. I thought the SFU Fungi Lab SPLOT was impressive (999 fungi photos collected via SFU).
Others I have seen within the year worth noting include these stellar uses if TRU Writer:
- Ecotoxicology student projects at University of Washington.
- CORE 2096 Reflect most likely Maha Bali’s students course reflection writings
- Media Buffs ENVS 3032: Environment, Media, and Society, a course offered by the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
- Visual Life an online open-source magazine dedicated to showcasing digital scholarship by undergraduate students exploring visual imagery in everyday life through Writing Studies courses at University of Washington Tacoma
The DailyBlank SPLOT theme sort of keeps motoring on running the DS106 Daily Create, it sorely needs a refresh as I had not completely disentangled the parts of it that relied on Twitter, although it is chugging along publishing to Mastodon via the WordPress ActivityPub plugin (look for it tooting via `@creating` and any replies in Mastodon show up in a specfiic daily create.
My own big flop is my Sadly Robotic Metaphors for AI running with TRU Collector. I wildly thought lots of folks would join in the fun of sharing those tacky GenAI images representing AI as robots and/or big glowing blue brains. So far, save for one, I’m the only player. Shrug. Maybe no one can find any.
Won’t be the first time my idea for a public collection site falls flat.
There’s more SPLOTs popping up, maybe less frequenlty, But I am overdue scrounging for examples to add.
And like the song goes:
The SPLOT goes on, the SPLOT goes on
I keep pushing updates to the repos.
La de da de de, la de da de da
MOOCs was once the rage, uh huh
History has turned the page, uh huh
The pandemic, the current thing, uh huh
Zoom classes are our newborn king, uh huh
The SPLOT goes on, the SPLOT goes on
I keep pushing updates to the repos.
La de da de de, la de da de da
The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da…
Featured Image: Remix of my own remix from the 2020 post. Likely not totally legal, though all parody. Just added some text to reflect the SPLOT beating on in 2025.
We need to keep revisiting our ideas every so often. One day, they’ll be back in! In all seriousness, you publish about what is possible and your ideas over the years could fill a good sized public library. Thanks for all you do … dum dum dum da dum dum da dum